I'm glad we went to space, truly. Racing the USSR might have been the wrong reason but it got us there. We've benefited immensely as a species from exploring the solar system and looking deep into the universe.

I'm not certain that racing China in AI is the right reason but it might get us... somewhere.

And, yet, the US AI companies are not actually making a profit, right? They're selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume (or lock in some kind of monopoly position, in a currently non-sticky product). We're all currently enjoying investor-subsidized tokens from the big guys, and that pushes out the reckoning for US AI. But, I think they're beginning to think maybe they need to ring the cash register. Copilot dramatically reducing usage limits and what models are available on its plans, Anthropic playing games with what's included in the Pro plan, etc. I think they're starting to feel the bleeding.

Not only is the investment that keeps US AI companies flying high slowing, I suspect in two or three years, we'll all mostly be using open models and the people making money will be the hardware manufacturers. Even the small models will keep getting more capable. I'd guess a model you can run on a high end, but not outrageously overbuilt, developer desktop or laptop (something like 128GB of unified RAM), will be competitive with the current frontier when it's allowed to search the web and do research and write test code. You can't fit as much knowledge in a small model (80GB of weights can't store the world's knowledge), but I don't have the world's knowledge in my head, either, and yet I can figure out most problems with a little googling and experimentation. The reasoning and tool use abilities of smaller models is where the gap is closing, and that's what will make the huge models obsolete for huge classes of problem.

Already, there are many classes of problem that the easily self-hostable Qwen 3.6 27B can solve that required a frontier model a year ago. When the self-hosted options reach Opus 4.5-ish levels of capability, the argument for paying for tokens for most work begins to look a lot less compelling. And, looking forward, 1.58 bit models are coming. Incredible intelligence density, and still a lot of improvements happening.

Theft without any consequences by copyright laws Surveillance pushed down our throats Labor Landscape destruction AI psychosis Private Companies controlling the AI pipeline Data centers destroying the environment.

That doesn't count as winning at all.

> Trump fits this moment well. He is a salesman at core, and Larry Ellison is too.

Larry just fired 30% of his people at Oracle because, apparently, he is in an immediate need for cash. Because Oracle's early AI bets aren't paying off.

>The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

Mass unemployment and an eventually collasping economy is winning?

How does commercialisation matter when China will pump however much money they need to into this? This is a national security issue for them, just as it is for the US.

Not even gonna bother clicking through this one, the title is that egregious. And by the way, you can be damn sure that if Anthropic or whichever other American frontier model model is the best of its day was on the cusp of going under, the US gov would either pump it full of government contracts or (less likely) nationalise it.

> The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization.

puke

Yeah, go ahead and run your country into the ground because of hypercapitalism and hypercommercialization, you're almost at the end game now! While the rest of us try to figure out how to actually build societies worthwhile to live in and experience, with healthcare and not waging war on our neighbors.

I don't know how people can seriously publish stuff like this and not feel like they're actively trying to make the world worse. Is money really the single thing y'all can focus on? Is there nothing better in life you can chase, even if it's also a number? So sad to see stuff like this.

Ppl don't understand Commercialization is not incidental to the Western system, it's why we beat out Communism. Commercialization incentivizes ppl to build, bc ownership and control.

The FSF was not an attack on commercialization, it was about giving users more freedom with their own copy.

AI commercialization is why we will always be a few steps ahead in AI.

The Chinese and Russians are free to join us. It's a pickup game.

Well we're certainly losing in terms of public sentiment. There's a real anti-technology mindset that has taken hold. Basically the equivalent of people protesting the electrification of the country early last century.

Chinese culture is quick to embrace the benefits.

Hahaha, but no.

It's like people forget the entire point, perhaps even definition of technology is "doing more with less."

The "brute force" of power and cycles is almost certainly the least important thing, perhaps even a hinderance.